Schools Firm Now At Front Of Class

January 9, 2002|By Lona O'Connor Education Writer

A Miami company aims to become a national player in the school-management field by merging with a similar company in Massachusetts.

Chancellor Academies, which runs charter and private schools in South Florida and around the state, will merge with Beacon Education Management of Massachusetts. The new company, to be called Chancellor Beacon Academies, will serve about 19,000 students from prekindergarten through 12th grade. The company will run 81 schools in eight states and the District of Columbia.

In the volatile and growing school management field, the merger puts a Florida company in the No. 2 position, behind Edison Schools, according to financial analysts.

"In terms of who's breaking out of the pack, this company is up there right now," said Jeffrey Silber, an educational industry analyst at Gerard Klauer Mattison.

With all the talk of corporate growth, the question is whether Chancellor Beacon will be tempted to increase the size of its schools. Visiedo, a former Miami-Dade school superintendent, vowed when he opened Chancellor in 1999 that school size and class size would stay small. Edison, by contrast, runs larger schools. Education experts generally agree that small schools are more effective.

"We're going to keep it small," said John J-H Kim, Chancellor Beacon chief executive officer. "We're committed to the 25-to-1 ratio [of students to teachers]. A parent or a child is not going to see any changes." Kim said that former Beacon schools will now use Chancellor's new online teacher training.

Chancellor Beacon's relative smallness gives it a better chance of becoming profitable than Edison, Silber said. Edison has very high overhead, including giving computers to all its third-graders. Edison, which has been in business since 1991, has yet to turn a profit, though it is expected to do so in 2005, Silber said. A publicly traded company (EDSN), Edison has about 75,000 students in 80 schools around the country.

The new Chancellor Beacon company will be privately owned. Before the merger, Chancellor had 9,000 students in 35 schools in Florida, Arizona and Washington, D.C. Locally, Chancellor runs charter schools in Lantana and North Lauderdale and a private school in Coral Springs. Before he formed his own company, Visiedo was part of the team that opened the city-run charter school in Pembroke Pines.

The new Chancellor Beacon company has raised a total of $80 million in equity, Kim said.

Lona O'Connor can be reached at lo'connor@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4604.